At Citrix Synergy this year, we made several announcements that showcased how serious we are about enabling organizations for the future of work. To add to all of those, I’m proud to announce the general availability of advanced features for the Citrix Ready workspace hub.

Yes, we’ve dotted our Is and cross the Ts to bring forth the features that transform the way your users access their workspaces on these low-cost, tiny, powerful devices. While the workspace hub device itself has been available to purchase from our Citrix Ready partners NComputing and ViewSonic since March, May 8 marked the general availability of Citrix Casting, Skype for Business RTME, and dual monitor support, all managed by XenMobile UEM.

You can read more about those advanced features from the previous blog posts on the workspace hub. For this post, however, I wanted to focus on the value the Citrix Ready workspace hub can bring to enterprises, based on some conversations I’ve had with customers who were a part of our early access program and tech preview. Throughout the development phase and fine tuning of the workspace hub’s features, customers in various industries highlighted the potential value this little device can bring to their business. Let’s take a look at some examples from the healthcare and financial sectors.

Improving clinician productivity

When we were in the initial phases of development for the workspace hub, we looked at transforming the way users access their virtual desktops and apps, aiming at improving productivity and workflows, but with no vertical distinction. However, when we showed Citrix Casting at HIMSS a couple of years ago, healthcare IT leaders were enamored with the technology and the implications it could have for their care teams. To many of them, it was as if Citrix Casting was designed with them in mind. Clinicians spend a lot of time throughout the day logging in and out of various applications and devices as they make their rounds. While logging into a shared workstation in a patient room may not seem like it’d take too much time, doing that multiple times a day adds up. Even if you replaced the log-in process with a smart card, there’s a potential security risk as a misplaced card can give a malicious actor access to sensitive patient data.

The Citrix Ready workspace hub with Citrix Casting, however, improves that whole scenario. The hub itself is an inexpensive device that can be placed in any patient room attached to a monitor with a keyboard and mouse. A clinician viewing a patient record via XenApp on a tablet device (authenticated through the device’s fingerprint reader) only needs to walk up to the workspace hub in the patient room. Once in front of the workstation, they simply swipe up on the tablet to move their session to the workstation. Once they’re wrapped up, they simply swipe down on the tablet to bring the Citrix session back to the tablet and move on to the next patient. Chris Fleck, VP of Emerging Solutions, showcases what that looks like in the video below.

Driving value for financial services

Citrix Casting is one of the features that raises eyebrows when I demo it for Citrix customers, but when I was at Mobile World Congress this year, I saw the potential it has beyond just improving the logon experience. While the workspace hub is packed with a slew of great features, it is also a powerful, enterprise-grade endpoint device that a lot of organizations want to use as a PC replacement. In a conversation with an IT leader from a large global financial organization, they saw the value in the workspace hub as a thin client replacement, but also as a desk phone replacement. With Skype for Business RTME and dual monitor support, financial services customers realized the potential the workspace hub can have for their call centers. The workspace hub helps them drive down costs by replacing costly desktop PCs, but also desktop phones, saving them upwards of $1,000 per employee workstation.

Those are just a couple of examples of the potential of the Citrix Ready workspace hub. I didn’t even get a chance to talk about the IoT implications, but you can read a bit more that from a previous blog post.

How do I get one?

The Citrix Ready workspace hub is available now through our Citrix Ready partners NComputing or ViewSonic. You can also work with your local trusted reseller or Citrix representative.